Thoughts from a humble librarian

Tag Archives: DC comics

This past year I started reading The Legend of Wonder Woman by Renae de Liz and fell in love. It is a 9 issue miniseries that I will review/discuss after it is complete in a couple months or so. Then, I picked up Wonder Woman Earth One by Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette. It was also well written, but I thought it fell short of Renae de Liz’s narrative and artistic representation. I wondered if it had to do with Grant Morrison being a male. This assessment felt a bit unfair, but I am not well read in past Wonder Woman interpretations, so I only had these two to go by. However, after reading Rucka’s Wonder Woman Rebirth, I know was unfair to men in my initial assessment. Rucka did a fantastic job with Wonder Woman in the DC Rebirth issue.

Wonder Woman holds the Lasso of Truth, which means she exposes lies. I am hoping this implies that she will be a key player in discovering the mystery of the new DC Universe. This particular issue opens with “Something’s happening…in my memory…the story keeps changing,” and it certainly does. It begins with her mother begging the gods for a child and being granted one formed by the clay, but it continues with OR she was conceived by the union of the Queen of the Amazons and the Ruler of Olympus (Zeus) and the Queen gave birth to a child (or children?). A pattern of this legend or that legend of her origin plays out back and forth through the narrative. Wonder Woman is confused and irritated at the constant changing of reality. Overall, she wants peace. I assume because of her frustrations she uses the Lasso of Truth on herself. A mirror shatters and she seems to see things more clearly. The reader is not privy to her newfound knowledge, which is great. It adds to the suspense and the intrigue as to what may have happened to our hero in the past and what will happen to our hero in the future.

Continuing the back and forth narrative presented in Wonder Woman Rebirth, this bi-weekly series will alternate storylines “as she untangles the mysteries of her present…and her past.” I am looking forward to seeing how her storylines meld into a complete narrative in the coming weeks.

In light of this week’s reveal in the current Captain America series by Marvel, it seems DC Universe Rebirth has been a bit overshadowed in the news I have seen. This fact disappointed me because, even though I am not the most avid reader of DC comics, I am interested in how they planned to handle the next transformation of the DC Universe. Plus, this issue also provided controversial information regarding the combination of universes published by DC that were probably never supposed to meet.

The Rebirth issue begins by deconstructing a watch. The quote inscribed on the watch is “every second is a gift.” Through art and broken narration, regardless of my knowledge of the DCU, I understand that the issue is going to be about lost time. The question is: what happened to cause time to be erased?

The entire comic follows Wally West as he races through time trying to find a friend who recognizes him so that he can stop running through time’s extra dimension. At first appearance this story seems to relate with Flashpoint, a rewriting of reality that led into the New 52 DC relaunch in 2011. Though I am not exactly sure how much, as I was not reading comic books regularly at the time. Nevertheless, what Wally discovers is that reality was not so much affected by the Flashpoint itself, but something else more powerful than Darkseid is driving the changes. This is a moment when I wish I was more familiar with DC characters and lore. It might be helpful for solving some of these mysteries. Then again, this is probably the creator’s way of getting me interested in reading more of the Rebirth series as a whole…

Due to my unfamiliarity with the source materials for creating this comic, I did a bit of research (not in-depth or anything), but I did discover just how much the Watchmen really had an impact on the new DC Universe. One of the things I truly appreciated about the comic was the focus on love and hope. Wally finds that love is what connects them and hope is what drives them to keep saving the world. This story is divided into five parts called Lost, Legacy, Love, Life, and Epilogue. There is an optimism that is integral to the world of superheroes and the creators wanted to break away from the Watchmen’s dark influence on the DCU and superheroes in general. However, the creators were not wanting to eliminate the influence of the Watchmen, but instead integrate them into the main universe. If there truly is going to be a more optimistic tone to the DC Universe through Rebirth, then I am excited about the future of the comics and I will look forward to reading more of their titles.